The Bookmark Thief: An Inkwell & Whiskers Cozy Mystery (Book 2)

An elderly Maine woman is found dead in her boathouse during a November storm. The town accepts the doctor's note. Marlowe disagrees with the drawer.It's been three weeks since Nora Blackwell decided to stay. Blackwell Books is hers now - repainted, reorganized, and humming with the prep work for the inaugural Blackthorn Book Fair: two hundred dealers, a rare-books exhibition at the Thornhaven library, and a centerpiece display of three exquisite silk bookmarks hand-painted by nineteenth-century botanical illustrator Cecily Marsh for the town's 1893 centennial.Then Phoebe Ellsworth - eighty-three years old, the keeper of three of those Marsh bookmarks - is found dead in her boathouse on the south shore. The doctor's note says a slip on wet stones, a heart that simply gave out. Nora isn't so sure. She had been the centerpiece's last private holder of the Cecily Marsh set. The bookmarks have been quietly disappearing from estate sales across the Maine coast for nearly a decade. And a Portland-based dealer named Davis Renton just happens to be at the Fair, asking pointed questions about regional bookmark holdings.What begins as a routine condolence call becomes a nine-year acquisition pattern, three coastal counties, and the small careful work Nora's great-aunt Vivian had been doing alone in the back room of the bookshop for seven years before her death.Marlowe has been watching a particular drawer in the dead woman's kitchen. The drawer turns out to matter. So does the latch on the boathouse door. So does the absence of a single steel pin.The Bookmark Thief is the second book in the Inkwell & Whiskers series. Stands alone - but readers of A Margin for Murder will catch the deeper threads.A feel-good cozy mystery - clean, character-driven, with a satisfying solve. Slow-burn romance, no graphic content.Free in Kindle Unlimited.

Pagina's: 299, Paperback, Independently published